
Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (Russian language: Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия) (29 March, 1899 - 23 December, 1953), Soviet Union politician and police chief, is remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin Great Purge of the 1930s, although in fact he presided only over the closing stages of the Purge. His period of greatest power was during and after World War II. After Stalin's death he was removed from office and executed by Stalin's successors. ==Rise to power== Beria was born, the son of a peasant, in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Abkhazia region of Georgia. He was educated at a technical school in Sukhumi, and is recorded as having joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1917 while an engineering student in Baku. (Some sources say that the Baku Party records are forgeries and that Beria actually joined the Party in 1919. It is also alleged that Beria joined and then deserted from the Red Army at this time, but this has not been established.) In 1920 or 1921 (accounts vary) Beria joined the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), the original Bolshevik political police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt, supported by the Red Army, occurred in the Menshevik Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Vecheka was heavily involved in this conflict. By 1922 Beria was deputy head of the Vecheka's successor, the OGPU (Combined State Political Directorate), in Georgia. Some sources allege that Beria was at this time an agent of the United Kingdom and/or Turkey intelligence services, but this has never been proved. Beria, as a fellow Georgian, was an early ally of Joseph Stalin in his rise to power within the Communist Party and the Soviet regime. In 1924 he led the repression of nationalist disturbances in Tbilisi, after which it is said that up to 5,000 people were executed. For this display of "Bolshevik ruthlessness" Beria was appointed head of the "secret-political division" of the Transcaucasia OGPU and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1926 he became head of the Georgian OGPU. He was appointed Party Secretary in Georgia in 1931, and for the whole Transcaucasia region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. Even after moving on from Georgia, he continued to effectively control the republic's Communist Party until it was purged in July 1953. By 1935 Beria was one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which rewrote the history of Transcaucasian Bolshevism to show that Stalin had been its sole leader from the beginning. When Stalin's purge of the Communist Party and government began in 1934 after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Beria ran the purges in Transcaucasia, using the opportunity to settle many old scores in the politically turbulent Transcaucasian republics. In June 1937 he said in a speech: "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed." ==Beria at the NKVD== In August 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out prosecution of the perceived enemies of the state known as the Great Purge, that affected millions of people. By 1938, however, the purge had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure of the Soviet state, its economy and armed forces, and Stalin had decided to wind the purge down. In September Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as head of NKVD (Yezhov was executed in 1940). The NKVD itself was then purged, with half its personnel being removed, and was restaffed with Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus. Beria's name has become closely identified with the Great Purge as well, but in fact he presided over the NKVD during an easing of the repression. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps, and it was officially admitted that there had been some injustices and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed on Yezhov. Nevertheless this liberalisation was only relative: arrests and executions continued, and in 1940, as war approached, the pace of the purges again accelerated. During this period Beria supervised the deportations of population from Poland and the Baltic states following their occupation by Soviet forces. In March 1940 he prepared the order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intellectuals, including 14,700 Polish POW at Katyn massacre near Smolensk and two other mass execution sites. In March 1939 Beria became a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo. Although he did not become a full member until 1946, he was already one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941 Beria was made a Commissar General of State Security, a highest military-like rank within the Soviet police ranking system of that time. In February 1941 he became a Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), and in June, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, be became a member of the State Defence Committee (GKO). During World War II he took on major domestic responsibilities, using the millions of people imprisoned in NKVD labour camps for wartime production. He took control of armaments production, and also (together with Georgy Malenkov), the production of aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance. In 1944, as the Germans were driven from Soviet soil, Beria was in charge of dealing with the various ethnic minorities accused of collaboration with the invaders, including the Chechnia, the Ingushetia, the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. All these were deported to Soviet Central Asia, with significant loss of life. See "Population transfer in the Soviet Union". In December 1944 Beria was also charged with supervision of the Soviet atomic bomb project. In this connection he ran the successful Soviet espionage campaign against United States Manhattan Project which resulted in Soviets obtaining a nuclear bomb technology, building and testing a bomb in 1949. In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a uniform military system, Beria's rank was converted to that of a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Although he had never held a military command, Beria, through his organisation of war production, made a significant contribution to the Soviet Union's victory in World War II. ==Postwar politics== Svetlana_Alliluyeva">Image:ac.beria2.jpg|thumb|300px|Beria with Stalin (in background) and Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva With Stalin nearing 70, the postwar years were dominated by a concealed struggle for the succession among his lieutenants. At the end of the war the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war and placed in charge of all cultural matters in 1946. Even during the war Beria and Zhdanov had been rivals, but after 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to block Zhdanov's rise. In January 1946 Beria left the post of the head of the NKVD (which was soon renamed MVD), while retaining general control over national security matters from his post of Deputy Prime Minister, under Stalin. The new head, Sergei Kruglov, was not Beria's protégé. In addition, by the Summer of 1946, Beria's loyalist Vsevolod Merkulov was replaced by Victor Abakumov as head of the MGB. Kruglov and Abakumov then moved expeditiously to replace the security apparatus leadership with new people outside of Beria's inner circle, such that very soon Deputy Minister of MVD Stepan Mamulov represented the only remnant of it outside of foreign intelligence on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed---initially tangentially, but with time more directly---at Beria. In the context of Stalin's growing anti-semitism, one of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October of 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, arrest of many other members, and the eventual dissolution of the committee. The reason this campaign had negatively reflected on Beria was that not only did he champion creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews (to mention only a few: Solomon Milshtein, Leonid Raikhman, Stepan Mamulov, Yuvelian Sumbatov-Topuridze, and Naum Eitingon in the security apparatus and Boris Vannikov and Yuli Khariton in the special Committee supervising the atomic bomb project). Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and Beria and Malenkov then moved to consolidate their power with a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the more than 2,000 people executed were Zhdanov's deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, the economic chief Nikolai Voznesensky, the Leningrad Party head Pyotr Popkov and the Prime Minister of the RSFSR, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev---a staunch anti-semite himself---began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis. Zhdanov's death did not, however, stop the anti-semitic campaign. During the postwar years Beria supervised the establishment of Soviet-style systems of secret police, and hand-picked the leaders, in the countries of the Eastern Europe. Again, a substantial number of these leaders were Jews. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November of 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedrich Geminder, and others in Prague, who were generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitism, but, more specifically, of using Czechoslovakia to funnel weapons to Israel. From Beria's standpoint, this charge was extremely explosive, because massive help to Israel was provided on his direct orders. Altogether, 14 leaders of Czechoslovakia, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed in Prague. Similar investigations have concurrently proceeded in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries. Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semion Ignatiev, who further intensified the anti-semitic campaign. In December of 1952, the widest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union---that later came to be known as Doctor's Plot---has started. A number of country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, hysterical anti-semitic propaganda campaign sprang in the mass-media. Altogether, 37 doctors (most of them Jewish) were arrested, and MGB, on Stalin's orders, started to prepare for deportation of the entire Jewish population to Russia's far east. Days after Stalin's death, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved. ==After Stalin== On March 5 1953 Stalin died four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders. The political memoirs of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin, although no hard evidence has ever been produced to support this assertion. There is evidence, however, that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, Beria denied him medical help, claiming that Stalin was "sleeping." It is possible that all the Soviet leaders agreed to allow Stalin, whom they all feared, to die. After Stalin's death Beria was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister and reappointed head of the MVD. His close ally Malenkov was the new Premier of the Soviet Union and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was the second most powerful leader and, given Malenkov's lack of real leadership qualities, was in a position to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary, which was seen as a less important post than the Prime Ministership. Despite Beria's history as one of Stalin's most ruthless henchmen, he was at the forefront of liberalisation after Stalin's death. Beria publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud," investigated and solved the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, and released over a million of political prisoners from labour camps. In April he signed a decree banning the use of torture in Soviet prisons. He also signalled a more liberal policy towards the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. He persuaded the Politburo of the CPSU (as the Politburo had been renamed) and the Council of Ministers to urge the Communist regime in East Germany to allow liberal economic and political reforms. Beria has manoeuvred to marginalize the role of the party apparatus in the decision-making process in policy and economic matters. Some writers have held that Beria's liberal policies after Stalin's death were a tactic to manoeuvre himself into power. Even if he was sincere, they argue, Beria's past made it impossible for him to lead a liberalising regime in the Soviet Union, a role which later fell to Khrushchev. The essential task of Soviet reformers was to bring the secret police under party control, and Beria could not do this since the police were the basis of his own power. Others have argued that he had represented a truly reformist agenda, and that his eventual removal from power has delayed a radical political and economic reform in the Soviet Union by almost forty years. Even though some of Beria's rhetoric was later adopted by Khrushchev, Communist ideology continued to dominate the country and cripple its economy until 1991. Given his record, it is not surprising that the other party leaders were suspicious of Beria's motives in all this. The alliance between Beria and Malenkov was opposed by Khrushchev, but he was initially unable to challenge the Beria-Malenkov axis. His opportunity came in June 1953 when demonstrations against the Communist regime in East Germany broke out in East Berlin (see Workers Uprising of 1953 in East Germany). This convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power. Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a party ''coup'' against Beria, whose principal ally Malenkov quickly decided to abandon him. ==Beria's fall== Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. According to the most recent accounts Khrushchev convened a meeting of the Praesidium on June 26, where he launched an attack on Beria, accusing him of being in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich?" Molotov and others then also spoke against Beria, and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Malenkov then pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in and arrested Beria. Some accounts say that Beria was killed on the spot, but this is incorrect. Beria was taken first to the Lefortovo prison and then to the headquarters of General Kiril Moskalenko, commander of Moscow District Air Defence and a wartime friend of Khrushchev's. His arrest was kept secret until his principal lieutenants could be arrested. The NKVD troops in Moscow which had been under Beria's command were disarmed by regular Army units. ''Pravda'' announced Beria's arrest only on July 10, crediting it to Malenkov and referring to Beria's "criminal activities against the Party and the State." In December it was announced that Beria and six accomplices, "in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies," had been "conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism." Beria was tried by a "special tribunal" in the absence of the sides and no appeal. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and his subordinates were immediately executed. However, according to other accounts including his son's, Beria's house was assaulted on 26 June 1953, by military units and Beria himself was killed on the spot. A member of the special tribunal, Nikolay Schwernik, has subsequently told Beria's son that he had never seen Beria alive. Beria's wife and son were sent to a labour camp, but survived and were later released. His son Sergo Beria is still alive and defending his father's reputation. After Beria's death the MVD was reduced from the status of a Ministry to a Committee (known as the KGB), and no Soviet police chief ever again held the kind of power Beria had wielded. In May 2000 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by members of Beria's family to overturn his 1953 conviction. The application was based on a Russian law that provided for rehabilitation of victims of false political accusations. The court argued, however, that "Beria was the organizer of repression against his own people, and therefore could not be considered a victim". ==Allegations against Beria== Although Beria was formally convicted for being a British spy, the Communist Leadership has early on sought to spice up the charges with informal accusations of more personal nature. These included allegations that he raped numerous women, and that he personally tortured and killed many of his political victims. Charges of sexual misconduct against Beria were first made in the speech by a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikolay Shatalin, at the Plenary Meeting of the committee on July 10, 1953, two weeks after Beria's arrest. Shatalin said that Beria had had sexual relations with numerous women and that he had contracted syphilis as a result of his sex with prostitutes. Shatalin referred to a list (kept by Beria's bodyguard) of over 25 women with whom Beria had had sex. Over time, however, the charges became more dramatic. Khrushchev in his posthumously published memoirs wrote: "We were given a list of more than a 100 names of women. They were dragged to Beria by his people. And he had the same trick for them all: all who got to his house for the first time, Beria would invite for a dinner and would propose to drink for the health of Stalin. And in wine, he would mix in some sleeping pills..." By 1980s, the sexual misconduct stories about Beria included rape of teenage girls. The author Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, who wrote a biography of Beria, said in an interview: "At night he would cruise the streets of Moscow seeking out teenage girls. When he saw one who took his fancy he would have his guards deliver her to his house. Sometimes he would have his henchmen bring five, six or seven girls to him. He would make them strip, except for their shoes, and then force them into a circle on their hands and knees with their heads together. He would walk around in his dressing gown inspecting them. Then he would pull one out by her leg and haul her off to rape her. He called it the flower game." [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/23/wruss23.xml] Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in either the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of former Beria's residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London ''Daily Telegraph'' reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find - a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones - was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars." Such reports are treated with scepticism by some commentators. It should be noted that despite partial opening of Soviet archives since 1991, most of the Beria-related material remains classified. Memoirs by the people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo Beria and a former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov deny these charges and draw a very different portrait of Beria. ==See also== *History of the Soviet Union *List of Georgians ==Further reading== *''The Mystery of Stalin's Death'' by Abdurahman Avtorkhanov, in: "Novyi Mir", #5, 1991, pp. 194-233 (in Russian) *''Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant'' by Amy Knight, Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-691-03257-2 *''Beria'', Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Moscow, 1999 *''Beria, My Father'', Sergo Beria, London, 2001 *''Khruschev Remembers: Last Testament'' by Nikita Khruschev, Random House, 1977, ISBN 0517175479 *''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'' by Pavel Sudoplatov, Little Brown & Co, 1994 ISBN 0316773522 *''Lavrenty Beria, 1953. Stenographic Report of July's Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Other Documents'', by A.N. Yakovlev, Ed., V. Naumov, Yu. Sigachev, International Democracy Foundation, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian). ISBN 5-89511-006-1 ==External links== *[http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/01/interviews/beria/ Interview with Sergo Beria] *[http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/2000/05/000529-beria1.htm An outline of the Russian Supreme Court decision of 29 May 2000] 1899 births 1953 deaths Cold War people Georgian people Marshals of the Soviet Union NKVD Soviet politicians Soviet nuclear program Soviet history Soviet executions Executed people
==Old talk== Adam, please watch what you are doing when you are reverting one's edits. First, you rebroke the fixed links. Second, you restored the POV-ish phrasing: "it is true...". User:Mikkalai 16:32, 4 May 2004 (UTC) After re-reading the section I see your point: "it is true" is quite logical in the context. When I saw it first, it seemed to me as an extra embellishment. Next time I'll be more carteful with context. User:Mikkalai 01:14, 5 May 2004 (UTC) Well, Adam is intent on adding to the intro that Beria was a notorious murderer and rapist. I have no personal opinion on whether he was really a serial rapist or murdered people with his own hands, because I have not reviewed the evidence to such an extent as would be necessary to draw a conclusion, but on the other hand, this really makes no difference, because whatever I think is not history's final judgment. It seems to me totally contrary to NPOV to unequivocally state that a controversial historical figure is guilty of such crimes. NPOV would require the evidence to be presented without simply telling the reader what he or she should believe. Adam can write 10 paragraphs worth of documentation for the charges if he wants, as long as he does not force a conclusion on the reader. He knows that the history of the Stalinist USSR and its leading personalities is controversial and needs to be treated as such. User:Everyking 11:18, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) First let's get our facts right. I did not add the phrase in question, someone else did. I merely objected to its removal, or rather to its removal on the grounds that it is "POV" to state the fact that Beria was both a murderer, in a personal hands-on sense, and a serial rapist. These facts have been thoroughly documented in recent post-Soviet biographies. If Everyking is going to intervene in debates about Soviet history he needs to do some reading first. These facts were also examined by the Russian courts when an attempt was made to overturn the 1953 verdict against Beria. Now, if the phrase was removed in order to state the matter more fully in a following paragraph (for example), I would have no objection. If I was writing an article about Beria, that is how I would handle the issue. Since this is not my article, however, what I would do with the phrase is not the point. The previous author has stated the matter in this way, and has every right to do so. The reference cannot be simply deleted because of some absurd perversion of the NPOV rule. ''Stating facts can never be POV'', even if they are held not to be stated fully enough or in the right place. Everyking says: "It seems to me totally contrary to NPOV to unequivocally state that a controversial historical figure is guilty of such crimes." Has he really thought through the implications of this statement? He is saying that it can never be said that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mobutu, Ceaucescu etc, were guilty of the various crimes they committed, no matter how thoroughly these crimes are documented and attested and generally accepted as proved. What kind of rule is that for an encyclopaedia? User:Adam Carr 11:43, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) *I think it's wrong to use the word "notorious" here. Notorious means generally known and talked of, especially in an unfavorable sense. He may be notorious now, to historians, but I don't think he was notorious at the time, in the sense that the citizens of Moscow, say, thought of him being primarily a murderer or rapist. They thought of him as being the dreaded head of the secret police, yes, and the most fearsome crony of Stalin, but not primarily as being a man who carried out personal murders or who abducted women on the street to be raped at his apartment. I think this lead paragraph should say that he was a state-appointed murderer of millions of people, or words to that effect. The fact that he was also, at times, a personal murder and serial rapist should, I think, be in a later paragraph.User:Hayford Peirce 01:06, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC) ==Everyking's revision== *I think it is precisely right. Someone else apparently seemed to think that the info about his personal murders and rapes belonged in the first paragraph but, compared to the millions of other deaths he was responsible for, I for one think it is of minor importance. ==Silly weasel words== Oh so it is only "widely believed" that Beria was responsible for millions of deaths, is it? Why does Everyking persists in rewriting this article the conceal the historical facts? Does he do the same thing for Himmler or Pol Pot? This is the use of "NPOV" weasel words to conceal facts which have been amply documented and should be stated as facts. However I won't bother with a revert war at the moment, since this is a very poor article and I intend completely rewriting it when I get time. User:Adam Carr 12:53, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) :To say that I am trying to conceal anything by adding objective, qualifying phrases like "widely believed" is a ridiculous assertion. I look forward to reading your rewrite, though; will it display the same rigorous neutrality as your rewrite of the article on Robert Conquest? User:Everyking 14:32, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) ::I agree with Adam - these weasel words take the desire for NPOV into a sick joke. Qualifying proven facts is not NPOV User:PMelvilleAustin 16:08, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) ==Jewish?== Wasn't Beria Jewish? *I can't say for sure that he wasn't, but the only sources on the Web that suggest he was Jewish are clearly antisemitic, and the context is always either of the form "Communism was a Jewish conspiracy and Beria's another damned Jew" or "Stalin wasn't all that bad; it was the Jew Beria who did the real nasty stuff." --User:Jpgordon 02:53, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC) == Soviet phraseology == The following piece replaced. User:Mikkalai 00:10, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC) :''Georgia was at this time still being contested between the Bolshevik government and armed Georgian nationalists'' :There was no "armed nationalists", there was Democratic Republic of Georgia at this time. == Mingrelians == Mingrelians or Megrels are 100% Georgians and they are not related to the Georgians neither strictly speaking nor softly speaking. I have deleted that incorrect phrasing. :He was still mingrelian. The info can be presented in correct way, rather than simply deleted. User:Mikkalai 16:43, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Urban legends ("Personal character") == The vigor with which npov is applied throughout this article varies considerably; but the "Personal character" section clearly stands out. It is a pure fantasy on the face of it and is not rooted in any documents. Or if such documents exist, they are not referenced. The section is heavily relied upon the book of the Russian "historian" Anton Antonov-Ovseenko ("the first fully researched biography of Beria", cf. [http://lib.align.ru/book/win/470.html Лаврентий Берия]). To begin with, the book is not "fully researched", not "well researched", and not at all researched in the Academic sense of the word. It is not related to the "the opening of the Soviet archives" after the end of the Soviet regime in 1991, as the section implies. [http://www.hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_a/antonov_ovs.html This source] claims that Anton Antonov-Ovseenko used as his sources "private archives and memoires of old Bolsheviks and Menshiviks" ("В качестве источников широко использовал частные архивные материалы, воспоминания старых большевиков и меньшевиков"). No specific source is cited in the book, however. To put it another way, the book collects and inflates gossip and innuendo spread by old communist butchers not unlike Anton Antonov-Ovseenko's own father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who in 1917 organised arrest of Russia's legitimate government and looting of Winter Palace, and is well-known to Russians as "the butcher of Tambov" for organizing of mass murders of civilians in the Tambov region in 1921. The other source for the section appears to be the following [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/23/wruss23.xml Christmas Eve horror story] in London's Telegraph, which in turn relies on certain Anil, an Indian worker of the Tunisian Embassy in Moscow for the last decade or so who was showing a "plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars"---no matter that plastic was not even available in 1953. Complete drivel, actually. Is this the gold standard of substantiation Wikipedia should adhere to? If so, let's go ahead and fill Wikipedia pages with sexy images of Hillary Clinton killing Vincent Foster in the midst of a hot and humid Southern night, or MI-5 doing in Princess Diana in Paris. A perceptive mind like Adam's will have no troubles finding sources for all these and zillion more "urban legends". So, that's how I suggest we rename the section, "Urban legends". After all, it would be a pity to have to part with such picturesque material altogether. I am putting a "disputed" tag on the article, and will give Adam time to comment. --User:Alexei 02:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Forgot to mention: Antonov-Ovseenko's book was written in 1979-88, before the opening of the "Soviet archives". --User:Alexei 02:22, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ---- *I will ignore Alexei's rather silly and inflated rhetoric, and will just make the obvious points that (a) the behaviour of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko is irrelevant to the veracity of books written by his son, and (b) the bones found in Beria's cellar were put in the plastic bag by the people who found them and not by Beria. *If Alexei wishes to edit the article to reflect his view that Beria did not do the things historians say he did, he is welcome to do so, provided he provides sources, as I have done. *I can't find any reference to Antonov-Ovseenko's book being published before 1999. Here is the Library of Congress reference: LC Control Number: 00306220 Type of Material: Text (Book, Microform, Electronic, etc.) Brief Description: Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, 1920- Beriia / Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Moskva : Izd-vo AST, 1999. 469 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. Possibly Alexei is confusing this book with Antonov-Ovseenko's ''The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny'', New York, 1981. User:Adam Carr 05:11, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * Re the Ovseenko's book timing, cross-check [http://lib.align.ru/book/win/470.html the reference] and see that the _last_ line says, in Russian, "Москва. 1979-1988 гг.". Agreed, the book was not _published_ then, but the point is, the author had not have access to any secret archives at the time of _writing_. And he is not even claiming this. Where did this statement come from, anyway? ::I don't read Russian and I don't know what "Москва. 1979-1988 гг.". means or refers to. It is clearly not a date of publication. If the book was published in 1999 it seems reasonable to assume that the author used the archival resources available to him in the 1990s. Why would he write a book in 1979 and publish it 20 years later without revision? User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::"Москва. 1979-1988 гг." means, written in Moscow from 1979 through 1988. 11 (not 20) years before the publication. Can you even count? Sorry, scrap it. FYI, in Soviet Union, it was not unusual---in fact, it was a norm---to not being able to publish books for decades because of censorship. Not London, OK? Not Melbourne. Not Sydney. Get it? Examples include Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarite" published some 30 years after being written, V. Grossman's books, etc. Rings a bell? Hello? :::(Free advice) As a general rule, your being a journalist, even if something seems "reasonable to assume", don't assume, research and find out what the truth is. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * Adam, neither you nor I have any way of knowing who put which bones where; but do you not agree that this entire story sounds---and probably is---a myth? How about the likelyhood of a foreigner finding anything of interest in the cellars of Beria's house after (and, 30 years after, at that) KGB has thoroughly cleaned up the house being passed to an _embassy_. Come on... Or, Beria hiding remains of the people he allegedly killed under the wall of his own kitchen? In the presence of his mother, disabled sister, and wife? And what would he hide this for and from whom? Be reasonable, admit it is fairy tales... He may be responsible for millions of lives, but it is clear he did not kill people in his kitchen and hide them under his house walls. ::I find it perfectly believable. Beria was clearly a criminal sadist. But if the allegation has been disproved by Russian authors or journalists, you are free to cite that fact. User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::I do not find it believable at all. What are we to do? :::And YOU are shifting the burden of proof here. It is YOUR duty to establish the facts, not, actually, mine or anybody else's to refute. Shit, or get off the pot. :::"Beria was clearly a criminal sadist" is, clearly, a POV. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * The sources, yes, I have already added a couple which I will use. But Antonov-Ovseenko's book is not, imo, a reliable source, I was trying to say to you. Not Academic. Not documented. And biased, yes. Here is what Anton [http://www.hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_a/antonov_ovs.html himself says] (about the Stalin's book, but it equally applies to Beria's): "Может быть, автору не удалось сдержать чувств человека, пережившего ужасы террора" (~="Perhaps, the author did fail to restrain the emotions of the person himself subjected to the nightmares of terror"). We should base our writing on something firmer than this. * And, it is not that I wish to express my point of view the same way as "you have done", but, imo, we should not be in the business of expressing "points of view". Can we agree? ::If you wish to dispute that the statements made in the article are factual, you are free to edit the article accordingly, and cite your sources (in English please). User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::Sources do not have to be in English---as sources go, most of the Russian-related material will actually not be. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) --User:Alexei 06:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC) If childish abuse and tiresome heavy irony is all you are capable of I am no longer interested in this discussion. I will assess any edits you make on their merits. And yes, at an English-language encyclopaedia sources have to be in English. You are free to go and edit the Russian Wikipedia. User:Adam Carr 08:57, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Makkalai, what was your reason to remove the reference to the book by Avtorhanov? I intend to use it as a basis for rewriting the piece on Slansky, Gomulka, etc. later on. --User:Alexei 04:19, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :It was removed as unused. It cannot be "further reading" in English encyclopedia, but may be used as a reference to the source of article material when you add it. User:Mikkalai 00:14, 14 May 2005 (UTC) Makkalai, I see that you've removed the two stories that I agree are compelete crap. My problem is though that the Antonov-Ovseenko's tales are equally unfounded, and yet you think they should be preserved. So what goes in and what stays out? Further, there are no stories of sadistic nature left there anymore. Yet I predict they are going to resurface. It is better imo to tell what they are and then assert absence of supporting evidence (or give the evidence if such exists). For now, the phrase "no police report could be uncovered of Tunisian Embassy finding human remains on its grounds" looks out of place as the original story is removed. Convince me we should leave it as is, then I will rename the section to "Allegations of sexual misconduct" and remove any mention of sadism altogether. On the policy: why can't we have a newspaper article as an external source? This is where the Ovseenko's quote comes from. --User:Alexei 02:59, 14 May 2005 (UTC) For now, I am reinserting the "bones" tales to keep the story from breaking. --User:Alexei 03:09, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Persecution of Leningrad intellectuals: Zhdanov vs. Beria== What is the source for the claim made in the "Postwar history" that Beria was largely responsible for the Zvezda/Leningrad affair (Akhmatova and Zoschenko). We should consider removing the claim if no such evidence is presented. --User:Alexei 07:32, 12 May 2005 (UTC) This has been resolved by Adam's removal of the line. --User:Alexei 22:24, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Alexei's edit== I have considerably condensed Alexei's edit (and improved its English). I have removed: *the statement that the Soviet leadership made up the allegations against Beria. This is Alexei's opinion. If he has evidence for this he is free to produce it. ::I did not make such a statement, here is what it if fact was: "the Communist Leadership has early on decided to spice up the charges with informal accusations ...". This is factual and supported by the cited sources. Indeed, (1) Shatalin represented the said leadership; (2) the accusations were informal in that they were made at a Party meeting rather than in the police investigation that then concurrently proceeded; and (3) the charges were made to spice up the main charges for which Beria was eventually convicted---as you are right to point out, these were not even criminal charges. --User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) *the long quote from Shatalin, which is unnecessary - all he alleges is that Beria had sex with lots of women, which is hardly the most serious allegation made against him. ::agreed, but I will restore the part about the 25+ list as it factually contradicts, and thus helps to put into the right light, the later statement by Khruschev.--User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) *the material about Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, which is just an attempt to smear his son by association. *the assertion that there is no verification of the story about the bones in the Tunisian Embassy. The story in the Telegraph is quite detailed, and if it is fabricated someone must have said so. Alexei should provide a source for this assertion. ::here I foresee that we will have more of a war. ::To begin with, I think the story should stay in (and I objected to Makkalai's removing it). It is not because I believe the story, but because it is a good (and rare) quotable example of such kind of stories. ::However, the story of the bones found during the re-tiling of the kitchen is unattributed, and, as you probably know by now :-), any attempt to unearth the source on the internet will fail (I have researched the Russian Internet as well). ::The story of the bones in the cellars is attributed (to "Anil"). Any attempt to confirm it on the internet, outside of the Telegraph's article context, will likewise fail. However, the story is a fantasy (probably by "Anil" rather them Mr. Strauss) on its face, and here is why. ::If any human remains were indeed found anywhere in the embassy, the embassy would surely make a police report, police would start an investigation, and the first thing they'd do would be to take the remains into evidence and run pathology tests to ascertain the origin and age of the bones, as well as whether they were human. This would not leave "Anil" any bones to carry around in a plastic bag. ::As part of my research, I have tried to uncoved any mention of the bones found there in the press releases of Moscow police, FSB, or police chronicle in Moscow papers, but did not find anything. This makes the removed statement ("...police report could not be uncovered...") factual. ::Thoughts? ::--User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) User:Adam Carr 09:16, 14 May 2005 (UTC) The first photo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ac.beria.jpg) appears to be a mirror image---the gold start SHOULD be on the left side---??? --User:Alexei 22:57, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Postwar politics == I am planning on expanding the section and changing the plot line wrt the Slansky etc. trials. Here is what appears to have happened: *Beria staffed the secret police and leadership of East European countries (which the current article correctly states) *A large percentage of these leaders were Jewish. A substantial number of Beria's subordinates in all his capacities were also Jewish (Vannikov, Raikhman, etc.) *When Beria surrendered his state-security work and concentrated on the atomic project and other military work (1945-6?), the state security went to Abakumov (not to Merkulov as Beria wanted), and later to Ignatiev *Abakumov, using Stalin's growing antisemitism, started persecution of Jews (Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, then Slansky, Berman, doctor's plot, etc.), as well as mingrelians, with the aim of getting to Beria as these were "his people". All these campaigns were put to an end, and the persecutors themselves arrested, immediately after Beria's rise to power in 3/53. Thoughts? That seems quite plausible, but it cannot be stated as fact here without ''sources''. Alexei needs to realise that this is not the ''Journal of Speculation about Soviet History'', it is an encyclopaedia, and nothing at all controversial can be presented without sources - that is, without showing that someone else has said it first, in print. User:Adam Carr 01:13, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::The original plot is published in Avtorkhanov's book. I know you can't read Russian; the original pub. was in French: "STALINE ASSASSINE: Le complot Bèria" PARIS, Èd. PRESSES DE LA RENAISSANCE, 1980. in-8é, 289 p. I can't find an English translation. ::It is also discussed in Amy Knight's book. ::I have been just looking to see if this plot seems completely off-the-wall to anybody---is it even controversial? ::--User:Alexei 01:47, 15 May 2005 (UTC) --User:Alexei 00:08, 15 May 2005 (UTC) I rewrote the "postwar politics" section, based mostly on Amy Knight's book (pp. 132--175) which is supported by Avtorkhanov's account. ==Beria's bones== I don't object to the edits Alexei has made. But in response to his arguments above: *Alexei says: ""the Communist Leadership has early on decided to spice up the charges with informal accusations ...". This is factual." If it is factual there must be a source, unless Alexei was an eye-witness to the deliberations of the CPSU leaders in 1953. At the moment it is just Alexei's opinion. ::"decided" was a questionable wording, I have changed it to "sought". Sergo Beria says that, rephrasing a bit, it's a complete fantasy that Khrushchev et al. decided to use to smear his father. If I follow you, you only dispute that they "decided" to do it, not that they have done it? It is becoming hair-splitting... --User:Alexei 01:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC) * The bones story is not unattributed. It is attributed to the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph is a reputable newspaper and Alexei can't just assert it is untrue without a source. He needs to come up with a ''source'' asserting that the story is false. Presumably when the Telegraph story appeared in 2003 there was some comment on it in the Russian media. If Alexei can come up with a quote from the Russian media saying "this story is untrue," that will be sufficient to have the story presented here as disputed rather than established. User:Adam Carr 00:49, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::Russian newsgroups ridiculed this at the time. I have't seen an actual article. --User:Alexei 01:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC) Neither Sergo Beria nor newsgroups are acceptable sources. User:Adam Carr 02:31, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::Agreed on the groups. ::If "the behaviour of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko is irrelevant to the veracity of books written by his son", by the same token, Sergo Beria's book should be given a benefit of a doubt. Was his account disputed? Let's be consistent. Reminds me of an old joke: :::A naked old Jew with a cross hanging on his neck is walking on the beach. Somebody addresses him: "Ivan Solomonovich, be consistent: either wear the trunks, or take off the cross..." ::--User:Alexei 04:15, 15 May 2005 (UTC) *There is no inconsistency in saying that Valdimir's Antonov-Ovseenko's career is irrelvant to the merits of Anton Antonov-Ovseenko's book, and saying that Sergo Beria is a worthless source on the crimes of his father. First because Beria's motive is obviously filial loyalty (just as Yevgeny Djugashvili maintains that dear old Grandad never hurt anyone), and secondly because he is too young have any firsthand knowledge of the events under discussion. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko is not writing about his father so there is no analogy. *I don't dispute that you know a lot about the period but I am beginning to find the preoccupation with Jews in your recent edits a bit worrying. My experience at Wikipedia is that a proccupation with Jews is a sure of sign of a crank. User:Adam Carr 05:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC) worries me too, after re-reading this. Surely the post-war history wasn't all anti-semitism; but this has played a big part. Can you help diversifying the section? What else of interest was going on in 46-53? On Beria-jr., he actually was a PhD and Dr. of Sci. by the time and a Stalin's Prize winner. About 30 in 53?? --05:53, 16 May 2005 (UTC) According to [http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/mycentury/transcript/wk28d4.shtml this] he was 74 in 1999 so he was born in 1925 so he was 28 when his father was executed. User:Adam Carr 06:54, 16 May 2005 (UTC) And I don't get the joke. so, is he still "too young [to] have any firsthand knowledge of the events under discussion" at 28 yo iyo? On the joke: most Jews are circumcised which is apparent when they are naked; most others (in the USSR) were not. So it is a juxtaposition of a cross (a symbol of a Christial affiliation) against a circumcised penis that was a basis for the (admittedly Russian) joke. --User:Alexei 07:14, 16 May 2005 (UTC) ==Image flipped== Again, the the main (1st) image is mirror-flipped left-to-right; who is gonna take care of it; Adam?--User:Alexei 06:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) I no longer touch images except those I have taken myself. I am sick of being pestered by the copyright police. User:Adam Carr 06:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) You've posted this image anyway; flipping it does not call the f-g polive in (by itself). Want me to do it?? --06:43, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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Lavrenty Beria
Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (Russian language: Лавре́нтий Па́влович Бе́рия) (29 March, 1899 - 23 December, 1953), Soviet Union politician and police chief, is remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin Great Purge of the 1930s, although in fact he presided only over the closing stages of the Purge. His period of greatest power was during and after World War II. After Stalin's death he was removed from office and executed by Stalin's successors. ==Rise to power== Beria was born, the son of a peasant, in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Abkhazia region of Georgia. He was educated at a technical school in Sukhumi, and is recorded as having joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March 1917 while an engineering student in Baku. (Some sources say that the Baku Party records are forgeries and that Beria actually joined the Party in 1919. It is also alleged that Beria joined and then deserted from the Red Army at this time, but this has not been established.) In 1920 or 1921 (accounts vary) Beria joined the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-Revolution and Sabotage), the original Bolshevik political police. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt, supported by the Red Army, occurred in the Menshevik Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Vecheka was heavily involved in this conflict. By 1922 Beria was deputy head of the Vecheka's successor, the OGPU (Combined State Political Directorate), in Georgia. Some sources allege that Beria was at this time an agent of the United Kingdom and/or Turkey intelligence services, but this has never been proved. Beria, as a fellow Georgian, was an early ally of Joseph Stalin in his rise to power within the Communist Party and the Soviet regime. In 1924 he led the repression of nationalist disturbances in Tbilisi, after which it is said that up to 5,000 people were executed. For this display of "Bolshevik ruthlessness" Beria was appointed head of the "secret-political division" of the Transcaucasia OGPU and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1926 he became head of the Georgian OGPU. He was appointed Party Secretary in Georgia in 1931, and for the whole Transcaucasia region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. Even after moving on from Georgia, he continued to effectively control the republic's Communist Party until it was purged in July 1953. By 1935 Beria was one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which rewrote the history of Transcaucasian Bolshevism to show that Stalin had been its sole leader from the beginning. When Stalin's purge of the Communist Party and government began in 1934 after the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Beria ran the purges in Transcaucasia, using the opportunity to settle many old scores in the politically turbulent Transcaucasian republics. In June 1937 he said in a speech: "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed." ==Beria at the NKVD== In August 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out prosecution of the perceived enemies of the state known as the Great Purge, that affected millions of people. By 1938, however, the purge had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure of the Soviet state, its economy and armed forces, and Stalin had decided to wind the purge down. In September Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as head of NKVD (Yezhov was executed in 1940). The NKVD itself was then purged, with half its personnel being removed, and was restaffed with Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus. Beria's name has become closely identified with the Great Purge as well, but in fact he presided over the NKVD during an easing of the repression. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps, and it was officially admitted that there had been some injustices and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed on Yezhov. Nevertheless this liberalisation was only relative: arrests and executions continued, and in 1940, as war approached, the pace of the purges again accelerated. During this period Beria supervised the deportations of population from Poland and the Baltic states following their occupation by Soviet forces. In March 1940 he prepared the order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intellectuals, including 14,700 Polish POW at Katyn massacre near Smolensk and two other mass execution sites. In March 1939 Beria became a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo. Although he did not become a full member until 1946, he was already one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941 Beria was made a Commissar General of State Security, a highest military-like rank within the Soviet police ranking system of that time. In February 1941 he became a Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), and in June, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, be became a member of the State Defence Committee (GKO). During World War II he took on major domestic responsibilities, using the millions of people imprisoned in NKVD labour camps for wartime production. He took control of armaments production, and also (together with Georgy Malenkov), the production of aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance. In 1944, as the Germans were driven from Soviet soil, Beria was in charge of dealing with the various ethnic minorities accused of collaboration with the invaders, including the Chechnia, the Ingushetia, the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. All these were deported to Soviet Central Asia, with significant loss of life. See "Population transfer in the Soviet Union". In December 1944 Beria was also charged with supervision of the Soviet atomic bomb project. In this connection he ran the successful Soviet espionage campaign against United States Manhattan Project which resulted in Soviets obtaining a nuclear bomb technology, building and testing a bomb in 1949. In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a uniform military system, Beria's rank was converted to that of a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Although he had never held a military command, Beria, through his organisation of war production, made a significant contribution to the Soviet Union's victory in World War II. ==Postwar politics== Svetlana_Alliluyeva">Image:ac.beria2.jpg|thumb|300px|Beria with Stalin (in background) and Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva With Stalin nearing 70, the postwar years were dominated by a concealed struggle for the succession among his lieutenants. At the end of the war the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war and placed in charge of all cultural matters in 1946. Even during the war Beria and Zhdanov had been rivals, but after 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to block Zhdanov's rise. In January 1946 Beria left the post of the head of the NKVD (which was soon renamed MVD), while retaining general control over national security matters from his post of Deputy Prime Minister, under Stalin. The new head, Sergei Kruglov, was not Beria's protégé. In addition, by the Summer of 1946, Beria's loyalist Vsevolod Merkulov was replaced by Victor Abakumov as head of the MGB. Kruglov and Abakumov then moved expeditiously to replace the security apparatus leadership with new people outside of Beria's inner circle, such that very soon Deputy Minister of MVD Stepan Mamulov represented the only remnant of it outside of foreign intelligence on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed---initially tangentially, but with time more directly---at Beria. In the context of Stalin's growing anti-semitism, one of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October of 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, arrest of many other members, and the eventual dissolution of the committee. The reason this campaign had negatively reflected on Beria was that not only did he champion creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews (to mention only a few: Solomon Milshtein, Leonid Raikhman, Stepan Mamulov, Yuvelian Sumbatov-Topuridze, and Naum Eitingon in the security apparatus and Boris Vannikov and Yuli Khariton in the special Committee supervising the atomic bomb project). Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and Beria and Malenkov then moved to consolidate their power with a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the more than 2,000 people executed were Zhdanov's deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, the economic chief Nikolai Voznesensky, the Leningrad Party head Pyotr Popkov and the Prime Minister of the RSFSR, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev---a staunch anti-semite himself---began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis. Zhdanov's death did not, however, stop the anti-semitic campaign. During the postwar years Beria supervised the establishment of Soviet-style systems of secret police, and hand-picked the leaders, in the countries of the Eastern Europe. Again, a substantial number of these leaders were Jews. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November of 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedrich Geminder, and others in Prague, who were generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitism, but, more specifically, of using Czechoslovakia to funnel weapons to Israel. From Beria's standpoint, this charge was extremely explosive, because massive help to Israel was provided on his direct orders. Altogether, 14 leaders of Czechoslovakia, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed in Prague. Similar investigations have concurrently proceeded in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries. Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semion Ignatiev, who further intensified the anti-semitic campaign. In December of 1952, the widest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union---that later came to be known as Doctor's Plot---has started. A number of country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, hysterical anti-semitic propaganda campaign sprang in the mass-media. Altogether, 37 doctors (most of them Jewish) were arrested, and MGB, on Stalin's orders, started to prepare for deportation of the entire Jewish population to Russia's far east. Days after Stalin's death, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved. ==After Stalin== On March 5 1953 Stalin died four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders. The political memoirs of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin, although no hard evidence has ever been produced to support this assertion. There is evidence, however, that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, Beria denied him medical help, claiming that Stalin was "sleeping." It is possible that all the Soviet leaders agreed to allow Stalin, whom they all feared, to die. After Stalin's death Beria was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister and reappointed head of the MVD. His close ally Malenkov was the new Premier of the Soviet Union and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was the second most powerful leader and, given Malenkov's lack of real leadership qualities, was in a position to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary, which was seen as a less important post than the Prime Ministership. Despite Beria's history as one of Stalin's most ruthless henchmen, he was at the forefront of liberalisation after Stalin's death. Beria publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud," investigated and solved the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, and released over a million of political prisoners from labour camps. In April he signed a decree banning the use of torture in Soviet prisons. He also signalled a more liberal policy towards the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. He persuaded the Politburo of the CPSU (as the Politburo had been renamed) and the Council of Ministers to urge the Communist regime in East Germany to allow liberal economic and political reforms. Beria has manoeuvred to marginalize the role of the party apparatus in the decision-making process in policy and economic matters. Some writers have held that Beria's liberal policies after Stalin's death were a tactic to manoeuvre himself into power. Even if he was sincere, they argue, Beria's past made it impossible for him to lead a liberalising regime in the Soviet Union, a role which later fell to Khrushchev. The essential task of Soviet reformers was to bring the secret police under party control, and Beria could not do this since the police were the basis of his own power. Others have argued that he had represented a truly reformist agenda, and that his eventual removal from power has delayed a radical political and economic reform in the Soviet Union by almost forty years. Even though some of Beria's rhetoric was later adopted by Khrushchev, Communist ideology continued to dominate the country and cripple its economy until 1991. Given his record, it is not surprising that the other party leaders were suspicious of Beria's motives in all this. The alliance between Beria and Malenkov was opposed by Khrushchev, but he was initially unable to challenge the Beria-Malenkov axis. His opportunity came in June 1953 when demonstrations against the Communist regime in East Germany broke out in East Berlin (see Workers Uprising of 1953 in East Germany). This convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power. Days after the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a party ''coup'' against Beria, whose principal ally Malenkov quickly decided to abandon him. ==Beria's fall== Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. According to the most recent accounts Khrushchev convened a meeting of the Praesidium on June 26, where he launched an attack on Beria, accusing him of being in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich?" Molotov and others then also spoke against Beria, and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Malenkov then pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in and arrested Beria. Some accounts say that Beria was killed on the spot, but this is incorrect. Beria was taken first to the Lefortovo prison and then to the headquarters of General Kiril Moskalenko, commander of Moscow District Air Defence and a wartime friend of Khrushchev's. His arrest was kept secret until his principal lieutenants could be arrested. The NKVD troops in Moscow which had been under Beria's command were disarmed by regular Army units. ''Pravda'' announced Beria's arrest only on July 10, crediting it to Malenkov and referring to Beria's "criminal activities against the Party and the State." In December it was announced that Beria and six accomplices, "in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies," had been "conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism." Beria was tried by a "special tribunal" in the absence of the sides and no appeal. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and his subordinates were immediately executed. However, according to other accounts including his son's, Beria's house was assaulted on 26 June 1953, by military units and Beria himself was killed on the spot. A member of the special tribunal, Nikolay Schwernik, has subsequently told Beria's son that he had never seen Beria alive. Beria's wife and son were sent to a labour camp, but survived and were later released. His son Sergo Beria is still alive and defending his father's reputation. After Beria's death the MVD was reduced from the status of a Ministry to a Committee (known as the KGB), and no Soviet police chief ever again held the kind of power Beria had wielded. In May 2000 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by members of Beria's family to overturn his 1953 conviction. The application was based on a Russian law that provided for rehabilitation of victims of false political accusations. The court argued, however, that "Beria was the organizer of repression against his own people, and therefore could not be considered a victim". ==Allegations against Beria== Although Beria was formally convicted for being a British spy, the Communist Leadership has early on sought to spice up the charges with informal accusations of more personal nature. These included allegations that he raped numerous women, and that he personally tortured and killed many of his political victims. Charges of sexual misconduct against Beria were first made in the speech by a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikolay Shatalin, at the Plenary Meeting of the committee on July 10, 1953, two weeks after Beria's arrest. Shatalin said that Beria had had sexual relations with numerous women and that he had contracted syphilis as a result of his sex with prostitutes. Shatalin referred to a list (kept by Beria's bodyguard) of over 25 women with whom Beria had had sex. Over time, however, the charges became more dramatic. Khrushchev in his posthumously published memoirs wrote: "We were given a list of more than a 100 names of women. They were dragged to Beria by his people. And he had the same trick for them all: all who got to his house for the first time, Beria would invite for a dinner and would propose to drink for the health of Stalin. And in wine, he would mix in some sleeping pills..." By 1980s, the sexual misconduct stories about Beria included rape of teenage girls. The author Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, who wrote a biography of Beria, said in an interview: "At night he would cruise the streets of Moscow seeking out teenage girls. When he saw one who took his fancy he would have his guards deliver her to his house. Sometimes he would have his henchmen bring five, six or seven girls to him. He would make them strip, except for their shoes, and then force them into a circle on their hands and knees with their heads together. He would walk around in his dressing gown inspecting them. Then he would pull one out by her leg and haul her off to rape her. He called it the flower game." [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/23/wruss23.xml] Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in either the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of former Beria's residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London ''Daily Telegraph'' reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find - a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones - was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars." Such reports are treated with scepticism by some commentators. It should be noted that despite partial opening of Soviet archives since 1991, most of the Beria-related material remains classified. Memoirs by the people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo Beria and a former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov deny these charges and draw a very different portrait of Beria. ==See also== *History of the Soviet Union *List of Georgians ==Further reading== *''The Mystery of Stalin's Death'' by Abdurahman Avtorkhanov, in: "Novyi Mir", #5, 1991, pp. 194-233 (in Russian) *''Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant'' by Amy Knight, Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-691-03257-2 *''Beria'', Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, Moscow, 1999 *''Beria, My Father'', Sergo Beria, London, 2001 *''Khruschev Remembers: Last Testament'' by Nikita Khruschev, Random House, 1977, ISBN 0517175479 *''Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster'' by Pavel Sudoplatov, Little Brown & Co, 1994 ISBN 0316773522 *''Lavrenty Beria, 1953. Stenographic Report of July's Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Other Documents'', by A.N. Yakovlev, Ed., V. Naumov, Yu. Sigachev, International Democracy Foundation, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian). ISBN 5-89511-006-1 ==External links== *[http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/01/interviews/beria/ Interview with Sergo Beria] *[http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/2000/05/000529-beria1.htm An outline of the Russian Supreme Court decision of 29 May 2000] 1899 births 1953 deaths Cold War people Georgian people Marshals of the Soviet Union NKVD Soviet politicians Soviet nuclear program Soviet history Soviet executions Executed people
_and_Stalin's_daughter_<a_href=\){kind=link}
Lavrenty Beria
==Old talk== Adam, please watch what you are doing when you are reverting one's edits. First, you rebroke the fixed links. Second, you restored the POV-ish phrasing: "it is true...". User:Mikkalai 16:32, 4 May 2004 (UTC) After re-reading the section I see your point: "it is true" is quite logical in the context. When I saw it first, it seemed to me as an extra embellishment. Next time I'll be more carteful with context. User:Mikkalai 01:14, 5 May 2004 (UTC) Well, Adam is intent on adding to the intro that Beria was a notorious murderer and rapist. I have no personal opinion on whether he was really a serial rapist or murdered people with his own hands, because I have not reviewed the evidence to such an extent as would be necessary to draw a conclusion, but on the other hand, this really makes no difference, because whatever I think is not history's final judgment. It seems to me totally contrary to NPOV to unequivocally state that a controversial historical figure is guilty of such crimes. NPOV would require the evidence to be presented without simply telling the reader what he or she should believe. Adam can write 10 paragraphs worth of documentation for the charges if he wants, as long as he does not force a conclusion on the reader. He knows that the history of the Stalinist USSR and its leading personalities is controversial and needs to be treated as such. User:Everyking 11:18, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) First let's get our facts right. I did not add the phrase in question, someone else did. I merely objected to its removal, or rather to its removal on the grounds that it is "POV" to state the fact that Beria was both a murderer, in a personal hands-on sense, and a serial rapist. These facts have been thoroughly documented in recent post-Soviet biographies. If Everyking is going to intervene in debates about Soviet history he needs to do some reading first. These facts were also examined by the Russian courts when an attempt was made to overturn the 1953 verdict against Beria. Now, if the phrase was removed in order to state the matter more fully in a following paragraph (for example), I would have no objection. If I was writing an article about Beria, that is how I would handle the issue. Since this is not my article, however, what I would do with the phrase is not the point. The previous author has stated the matter in this way, and has every right to do so. The reference cannot be simply deleted because of some absurd perversion of the NPOV rule. ''Stating facts can never be POV'', even if they are held not to be stated fully enough or in the right place. Everyking says: "It seems to me totally contrary to NPOV to unequivocally state that a controversial historical figure is guilty of such crimes." Has he really thought through the implications of this statement? He is saying that it can never be said that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mobutu, Ceaucescu etc, were guilty of the various crimes they committed, no matter how thoroughly these crimes are documented and attested and generally accepted as proved. What kind of rule is that for an encyclopaedia? User:Adam Carr 11:43, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC) *I think it's wrong to use the word "notorious" here. Notorious means generally known and talked of, especially in an unfavorable sense. He may be notorious now, to historians, but I don't think he was notorious at the time, in the sense that the citizens of Moscow, say, thought of him being primarily a murderer or rapist. They thought of him as being the dreaded head of the secret police, yes, and the most fearsome crony of Stalin, but not primarily as being a man who carried out personal murders or who abducted women on the street to be raped at his apartment. I think this lead paragraph should say that he was a state-appointed murderer of millions of people, or words to that effect. The fact that he was also, at times, a personal murder and serial rapist should, I think, be in a later paragraph.User:Hayford Peirce 01:06, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC) ==Everyking's revision== *I think it is precisely right. Someone else apparently seemed to think that the info about his personal murders and rapes belonged in the first paragraph but, compared to the millions of other deaths he was responsible for, I for one think it is of minor importance. ==Silly weasel words== Oh so it is only "widely believed" that Beria was responsible for millions of deaths, is it? Why does Everyking persists in rewriting this article the conceal the historical facts? Does he do the same thing for Himmler or Pol Pot? This is the use of "NPOV" weasel words to conceal facts which have been amply documented and should be stated as facts. However I won't bother with a revert war at the moment, since this is a very poor article and I intend completely rewriting it when I get time. User:Adam Carr 12:53, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) :To say that I am trying to conceal anything by adding objective, qualifying phrases like "widely believed" is a ridiculous assertion. I look forward to reading your rewrite, though; will it display the same rigorous neutrality as your rewrite of the article on Robert Conquest? User:Everyking 14:32, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) ::I agree with Adam - these weasel words take the desire for NPOV into a sick joke. Qualifying proven facts is not NPOV User:PMelvilleAustin 16:08, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) ==Jewish?== Wasn't Beria Jewish? *I can't say for sure that he wasn't, but the only sources on the Web that suggest he was Jewish are clearly antisemitic, and the context is always either of the form "Communism was a Jewish conspiracy and Beria's another damned Jew" or "Stalin wasn't all that bad; it was the Jew Beria who did the real nasty stuff." --User:Jpgordon 02:53, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC) == Soviet phraseology == The following piece replaced. User:Mikkalai 00:10, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC) :''Georgia was at this time still being contested between the Bolshevik government and armed Georgian nationalists'' :There was no "armed nationalists", there was Democratic Republic of Georgia at this time. == Mingrelians == Mingrelians or Megrels are 100% Georgians and they are not related to the Georgians neither strictly speaking nor softly speaking. I have deleted that incorrect phrasing. :He was still mingrelian. The info can be presented in correct way, rather than simply deleted. User:Mikkalai 16:43, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Urban legends ("Personal character") == The vigor with which npov is applied throughout this article varies considerably; but the "Personal character" section clearly stands out. It is a pure fantasy on the face of it and is not rooted in any documents. Or if such documents exist, they are not referenced. The section is heavily relied upon the book of the Russian "historian" Anton Antonov-Ovseenko ("the first fully researched biography of Beria", cf. [http://lib.align.ru/book/win/470.html Лаврентий Берия]). To begin with, the book is not "fully researched", not "well researched", and not at all researched in the Academic sense of the word. It is not related to the "the opening of the Soviet archives" after the end of the Soviet regime in 1991, as the section implies. [http://www.hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_a/antonov_ovs.html This source] claims that Anton Antonov-Ovseenko used as his sources "private archives and memoires of old Bolsheviks and Menshiviks" ("В качестве источников широко использовал частные архивные материалы, воспоминания старых большевиков и меньшевиков"). No specific source is cited in the book, however. To put it another way, the book collects and inflates gossip and innuendo spread by old communist butchers not unlike Anton Antonov-Ovseenko's own father, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, who in 1917 organised arrest of Russia's legitimate government and looting of Winter Palace, and is well-known to Russians as "the butcher of Tambov" for organizing of mass murders of civilians in the Tambov region in 1921. The other source for the section appears to be the following [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/12/23/wruss23.xml Christmas Eve horror story] in London's Telegraph, which in turn relies on certain Anil, an Indian worker of the Tunisian Embassy in Moscow for the last decade or so who was showing a "plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars"---no matter that plastic was not even available in 1953. Complete drivel, actually. Is this the gold standard of substantiation Wikipedia should adhere to? If so, let's go ahead and fill Wikipedia pages with sexy images of Hillary Clinton killing Vincent Foster in the midst of a hot and humid Southern night, or MI-5 doing in Princess Diana in Paris. A perceptive mind like Adam's will have no troubles finding sources for all these and zillion more "urban legends". So, that's how I suggest we rename the section, "Urban legends". After all, it would be a pity to have to part with such picturesque material altogether. I am putting a "disputed" tag on the article, and will give Adam time to comment. --User:Alexei 02:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Forgot to mention: Antonov-Ovseenko's book was written in 1979-88, before the opening of the "Soviet archives". --User:Alexei 02:22, 10 May 2005 (UTC) ---- *I will ignore Alexei's rather silly and inflated rhetoric, and will just make the obvious points that (a) the behaviour of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko is irrelevant to the veracity of books written by his son, and (b) the bones found in Beria's cellar were put in the plastic bag by the people who found them and not by Beria. *If Alexei wishes to edit the article to reflect his view that Beria did not do the things historians say he did, he is welcome to do so, provided he provides sources, as I have done. *I can't find any reference to Antonov-Ovseenko's book being published before 1999. Here is the Library of Congress reference: LC Control Number: 00306220 Type of Material: Text (Book, Microform, Electronic, etc.) Brief Description: Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, 1920- Beriia / Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Moskva : Izd-vo AST, 1999. 469 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. Possibly Alexei is confusing this book with Antonov-Ovseenko's ''The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny'', New York, 1981. User:Adam Carr 05:11, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * Re the Ovseenko's book timing, cross-check [http://lib.align.ru/book/win/470.html the reference] and see that the _last_ line says, in Russian, "Москва. 1979-1988 гг.". Agreed, the book was not _published_ then, but the point is, the author had not have access to any secret archives at the time of _writing_. And he is not even claiming this. Where did this statement come from, anyway? ::I don't read Russian and I don't know what "Москва. 1979-1988 гг.". means or refers to. It is clearly not a date of publication. If the book was published in 1999 it seems reasonable to assume that the author used the archival resources available to him in the 1990s. Why would he write a book in 1979 and publish it 20 years later without revision? User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::"Москва. 1979-1988 гг." means, written in Moscow from 1979 through 1988. 11 (not 20) years before the publication. Can you even count? Sorry, scrap it. FYI, in Soviet Union, it was not unusual---in fact, it was a norm---to not being able to publish books for decades because of censorship. Not London, OK? Not Melbourne. Not Sydney. Get it? Examples include Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarite" published some 30 years after being written, V. Grossman's books, etc. Rings a bell? Hello? :::(Free advice) As a general rule, your being a journalist, even if something seems "reasonable to assume", don't assume, research and find out what the truth is. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * Adam, neither you nor I have any way of knowing who put which bones where; but do you not agree that this entire story sounds---and probably is---a myth? How about the likelyhood of a foreigner finding anything of interest in the cellars of Beria's house after (and, 30 years after, at that) KGB has thoroughly cleaned up the house being passed to an _embassy_. Come on... Or, Beria hiding remains of the people he allegedly killed under the wall of his own kitchen? In the presence of his mother, disabled sister, and wife? And what would he hide this for and from whom? Be reasonable, admit it is fairy tales... He may be responsible for millions of lives, but it is clear he did not kill people in his kitchen and hide them under his house walls. ::I find it perfectly believable. Beria was clearly a criminal sadist. But if the allegation has been disproved by Russian authors or journalists, you are free to cite that fact. User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::I do not find it believable at all. What are we to do? :::And YOU are shifting the burden of proof here. It is YOUR duty to establish the facts, not, actually, mine or anybody else's to refute. Shit, or get off the pot. :::"Beria was clearly a criminal sadist" is, clearly, a POV. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) * The sources, yes, I have already added a couple which I will use. But Antonov-Ovseenko's book is not, imo, a reliable source, I was trying to say to you. Not Academic. Not documented. And biased, yes. Here is what Anton [http://www.hronos.km.ru/biograf/bio_a/antonov_ovs.html himself says] (about the Stalin's book, but it equally applies to Beria's): "Может быть, автору не удалось сдержать чувств человека, пережившего ужасы террора" (~="Perhaps, the author did fail to restrain the emotions of the person himself subjected to the nightmares of terror"). We should base our writing on something firmer than this. * And, it is not that I wish to express my point of view the same way as "you have done", but, imo, we should not be in the business of expressing "points of view". Can we agree? ::If you wish to dispute that the statements made in the article are factual, you are free to edit the article accordingly, and cite your sources (in English please). User:Adam Carr 06:38, 10 May 2005 (UTC) :::Sources do not have to be in English---as sources go, most of the Russian-related material will actually not be. --User:Alexei 08:07, 10 May 2005 (UTC) --User:Alexei 06:04, 10 May 2005 (UTC) If childish abuse and tiresome heavy irony is all you are capable of I am no longer interested in this discussion. I will assess any edits you make on their merits. And yes, at an English-language encyclopaedia sources have to be in English. You are free to go and edit the Russian Wikipedia. User:Adam Carr 08:57, 10 May 2005 (UTC) Makkalai, what was your reason to remove the reference to the book by Avtorhanov? I intend to use it as a basis for rewriting the piece on Slansky, Gomulka, etc. later on. --User:Alexei 04:19, 11 May 2005 (UTC) :It was removed as unused. It cannot be "further reading" in English encyclopedia, but may be used as a reference to the source of article material when you add it. User:Mikkalai 00:14, 14 May 2005 (UTC) Makkalai, I see that you've removed the two stories that I agree are compelete crap. My problem is though that the Antonov-Ovseenko's tales are equally unfounded, and yet you think they should be preserved. So what goes in and what stays out? Further, there are no stories of sadistic nature left there anymore. Yet I predict they are going to resurface. It is better imo to tell what they are and then assert absence of supporting evidence (or give the evidence if such exists). For now, the phrase "no police report could be uncovered of Tunisian Embassy finding human remains on its grounds" looks out of place as the original story is removed. Convince me we should leave it as is, then I will rename the section to "Allegations of sexual misconduct" and remove any mention of sadism altogether. On the policy: why can't we have a newspaper article as an external source? This is where the Ovseenko's quote comes from. --User:Alexei 02:59, 14 May 2005 (UTC) For now, I am reinserting the "bones" tales to keep the story from breaking. --User:Alexei 03:09, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Persecution of Leningrad intellectuals: Zhdanov vs. Beria== What is the source for the claim made in the "Postwar history" that Beria was largely responsible for the Zvezda/Leningrad affair (Akhmatova and Zoschenko). We should consider removing the claim if no such evidence is presented. --User:Alexei 07:32, 12 May 2005 (UTC) This has been resolved by Adam's removal of the line. --User:Alexei 22:24, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Alexei's edit== I have considerably condensed Alexei's edit (and improved its English). I have removed: *the statement that the Soviet leadership made up the allegations against Beria. This is Alexei's opinion. If he has evidence for this he is free to produce it. ::I did not make such a statement, here is what it if fact was: "the Communist Leadership has early on decided to spice up the charges with informal accusations ...". This is factual and supported by the cited sources. Indeed, (1) Shatalin represented the said leadership; (2) the accusations were informal in that they were made at a Party meeting rather than in the police investigation that then concurrently proceeded; and (3) the charges were made to spice up the main charges for which Beria was eventually convicted---as you are right to point out, these were not even criminal charges. --User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) *the long quote from Shatalin, which is unnecessary - all he alleges is that Beria had sex with lots of women, which is hardly the most serious allegation made against him. ::agreed, but I will restore the part about the 25+ list as it factually contradicts, and thus helps to put into the right light, the later statement by Khruschev.--User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) *the material about Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, which is just an attempt to smear his son by association. *the assertion that there is no verification of the story about the bones in the Tunisian Embassy. The story in the Telegraph is quite detailed, and if it is fabricated someone must have said so. Alexei should provide a source for this assertion. ::here I foresee that we will have more of a war. ::To begin with, I think the story should stay in (and I objected to Makkalai's removing it). It is not because I believe the story, but because it is a good (and rare) quotable example of such kind of stories. ::However, the story of the bones found during the re-tiling of the kitchen is unattributed, and, as you probably know by now :-), any attempt to unearth the source on the internet will fail (I have researched the Russian Internet as well). ::The story of the bones in the cellars is attributed (to "Anil"). Any attempt to confirm it on the internet, outside of the Telegraph's article context, will likewise fail. However, the story is a fantasy (probably by "Anil" rather them Mr. Strauss) on its face, and here is why. ::If any human remains were indeed found anywhere in the embassy, the embassy would surely make a police report, police would start an investigation, and the first thing they'd do would be to take the remains into evidence and run pathology tests to ascertain the origin and age of the bones, as well as whether they were human. This would not leave "Anil" any bones to carry around in a plastic bag. ::As part of my research, I have tried to uncoved any mention of the bones found there in the press releases of Moscow police, FSB, or police chronicle in Moscow papers, but did not find anything. This makes the removed statement ("...police report could not be uncovered...") factual. ::Thoughts? ::--User:Alexei 22:22, 14 May 2005 (UTC) User:Adam Carr 09:16, 14 May 2005 (UTC) The first photo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ac.beria.jpg) appears to be a mirror image---the gold start SHOULD be on the left side---??? --User:Alexei 22:57, 14 May 2005 (UTC) ==Postwar politics == I am planning on expanding the section and changing the plot line wrt the Slansky etc. trials. Here is what appears to have happened: *Beria staffed the secret police and leadership of East European countries (which the current article correctly states) *A large percentage of these leaders were Jewish. A substantial number of Beria's subordinates in all his capacities were also Jewish (Vannikov, Raikhman, etc.) *When Beria surrendered his state-security work and concentrated on the atomic project and other military work (1945-6?), the state security went to Abakumov (not to Merkulov as Beria wanted), and later to Ignatiev *Abakumov, using Stalin's growing antisemitism, started persecution of Jews (Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, then Slansky, Berman, doctor's plot, etc.), as well as mingrelians, with the aim of getting to Beria as these were "his people". All these campaigns were put to an end, and the persecutors themselves arrested, immediately after Beria's rise to power in 3/53. Thoughts? That seems quite plausible, but it cannot be stated as fact here without ''sources''. Alexei needs to realise that this is not the ''Journal of Speculation about Soviet History'', it is an encyclopaedia, and nothing at all controversial can be presented without sources - that is, without showing that someone else has said it first, in print. User:Adam Carr 01:13, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::The original plot is published in Avtorkhanov's book. I know you can't read Russian; the original pub. was in French: "STALINE ASSASSINE: Le complot Bèria" PARIS, Èd. PRESSES DE LA RENAISSANCE, 1980. in-8é, 289 p. I can't find an English translation. ::It is also discussed in Amy Knight's book. ::I have been just looking to see if this plot seems completely off-the-wall to anybody---is it even controversial? ::--User:Alexei 01:47, 15 May 2005 (UTC) --User:Alexei 00:08, 15 May 2005 (UTC) I rewrote the "postwar politics" section, based mostly on Amy Knight's book (pp. 132--175) which is supported by Avtorkhanov's account. ==Beria's bones== I don't object to the edits Alexei has made. But in response to his arguments above: *Alexei says: ""the Communist Leadership has early on decided to spice up the charges with informal accusations ...". This is factual." If it is factual there must be a source, unless Alexei was an eye-witness to the deliberations of the CPSU leaders in 1953. At the moment it is just Alexei's opinion. ::"decided" was a questionable wording, I have changed it to "sought". Sergo Beria says that, rephrasing a bit, it's a complete fantasy that Khrushchev et al. decided to use to smear his father. If I follow you, you only dispute that they "decided" to do it, not that they have done it? It is becoming hair-splitting... --User:Alexei 01:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC) * The bones story is not unattributed. It is attributed to the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph is a reputable newspaper and Alexei can't just assert it is untrue without a source. He needs to come up with a ''source'' asserting that the story is false. Presumably when the Telegraph story appeared in 2003 there was some comment on it in the Russian media. If Alexei can come up with a quote from the Russian media saying "this story is untrue," that will be sufficient to have the story presented here as disputed rather than established. User:Adam Carr 00:49, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::Russian newsgroups ridiculed this at the time. I have't seen an actual article. --User:Alexei 01:55, 15 May 2005 (UTC) Neither Sergo Beria nor newsgroups are acceptable sources. User:Adam Carr 02:31, 15 May 2005 (UTC) ::Agreed on the groups. ::If "the behaviour of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko is irrelevant to the veracity of books written by his son", by the same token, Sergo Beria's book should be given a benefit of a doubt. Was his account disputed? Let's be consistent. Reminds me of an old joke: :::A naked old Jew with a cross hanging on his neck is walking on the beach. Somebody addresses him: "Ivan Solomonovich, be consistent: either wear the trunks, or take off the cross..." ::--User:Alexei 04:15, 15 May 2005 (UTC) *There is no inconsistency in saying that Valdimir's Antonov-Ovseenko's career is irrelvant to the merits of Anton Antonov-Ovseenko's book, and saying that Sergo Beria is a worthless source on the crimes of his father. First because Beria's motive is obviously filial loyalty (just as Yevgeny Djugashvili maintains that dear old Grandad never hurt anyone), and secondly because he is too young have any firsthand knowledge of the events under discussion. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko is not writing about his father so there is no analogy. *I don't dispute that you know a lot about the period but I am beginning to find the preoccupation with Jews in your recent edits a bit worrying. My experience at Wikipedia is that a proccupation with Jews is a sure of sign of a crank. User:Adam Carr 05:41, 16 May 2005 (UTC) worries me too, after re-reading this. Surely the post-war history wasn't all anti-semitism; but this has played a big part. Can you help diversifying the section? What else of interest was going on in 46-53? On Beria-jr., he actually was a PhD and Dr. of Sci. by the time and a Stalin's Prize winner. About 30 in 53?? --05:53, 16 May 2005 (UTC) According to [http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/mycentury/transcript/wk28d4.shtml this] he was 74 in 1999 so he was born in 1925 so he was 28 when his father was executed. User:Adam Carr 06:54, 16 May 2005 (UTC) And I don't get the joke. so, is he still "too young [to] have any firsthand knowledge of the events under discussion" at 28 yo iyo? On the joke: most Jews are circumcised which is apparent when they are naked; most others (in the USSR) were not. So it is a juxtaposition of a cross (a symbol of a Christial affiliation) against a circumcised penis that was a basis for the (admittedly Russian) joke. --User:Alexei 07:14, 16 May 2005 (UTC) ==Image flipped== Again, the the main (1st) image is mirror-flipped left-to-right; who is gonna take care of it; Adam?--User:Alexei 06:03, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) I no longer touch images except those I have taken myself. I am sick of being pestered by the copyright police. User:Adam Carr 06:18, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC) You've posted this image anyway; flipping it does not call the f-g polive in (by itself). Want me to do it?? --06:43, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
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